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Commercial Free Education
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24/11/05 George Hook show interview
Maths, Irish, English . . . Would you like fries with that?
A new lobby group is fighting to make our schools a commercial-free zone. School-based advertising is banned in many countries, but Irish pupils have little protection, reports �ine Kerr.
This is the extreme case of education commercialisation that teachers now fear. At a time when educational spending in Ireland as a proportion of GDP languishes near the bottom in Europe, schools are struggling to acquire necessary resources and commercial companies are coming to their rescue.
Schools, which were once a commercial-free oasis, are now host to sponsors who have awarded themselves an educational dimension in order to meet their "child consumers" who employ effective "pester power" tactics with their parents.
In the classroom framework where the rhetoric of children is "because teacher said so", token collection schemes operated by retailers such as Tesco and Super Valu are becoming increasingly popular because they feed off children's insatiable appetite for collectables.
What schools signing up for the sponsored resources fail to realise is just how much the "one token for every �10 spent" schemes are actually costing, according to the newly formed Campaign for Commercial-Free Education.
Se�n Cottrell of the Irish Primary Principal's Network (IPPN) fears that the increasing role of commercial companies in providing resources for the new curriculum and school healthy-eating policies will lead to even less funding from the Department of Education.
"As teachers, we try to teach children about critical learning and then we turn around and encourage them to buy particular products in specific shops . . . where is all of this going to end if we don't call a halt to it now? Look at California in the United States, there's an entire town there that sold itself to Coca Cola and now everything is branded Coca Cola," said Mr Cottrell.
As Ireland plays catch-up with the commercial world of the US, where $600 billion (�514 billion) of consumer spending is known to be influenced by children, more blatant forms of advertising are surfacing.
Under the conditions of insurance firm Allianz's sponsorship of Cumann na mBunscoil, annual funding provided to the national committee is allocated based on a club's successful promotion of the Allianz name and logo in the media. Funding is determined on submission of the previous season's press cuttings and radio clips. No press coverage equates to zero funding from Allianz. "It's a sore point with some counties who argue that the system is slightly loaded in favour of the larger counties," said Malachy McGeeney of the Armagh branch of Cumann na mBunscoil.